Association Marketer Posts

Love is in the air! Valentine’s Day may be over, but that does not mean you should stop showing love to your members. Whether it is weekly eNewsletters or monthly updates, you are constantly connecting with your members. No one likes getting bogged down with irrelevant emails. Make sure you are sending content they actually want and will enjoy. The one thing all of these types of content have in common is time. Make sure your weekly eNewsletters or monthly updates are always up-to-date and reflect what has been going on in the lives of your members.

Here are 7 types of content that your members are sure to love you for:

Seasonal

Is it the season of giving or time for an egg hunt? As the seasons change, so should your content. One, this is the type of content that never gets old and is always changing, giving you plenty of opportunity. Don’t be afraid to have some fun during April showers or the cold New England winters. Your members will love the relevant and relatable content.

Events

Similar to the seasons, your calendar is full of events throughout the year. I’m not talking about just conferences or events specific for your association. Consider sporting events, award shows, etc. Showing enthusiasm for major events you know your members are watching will help connect with them even more.

Memes & GIFs

In the age of Internet memes and instantaneous interactions and reactions on social media, there has been new meaning to memes and GIFs. Now, this doesn’t mean send out your next eNewsletter solely with memes. But, when considering social media posts and engaging quickly with your members, humor applied with memes and GIFs can go a long way.

Videos

The possibilities of different types of videos are endless. From how to or explainer videos to promotional videos and live chats, making videos allows you to get your message across in a fun, creative way. Videos can be easily embedded into your eNewsletters and shared on social media. Plus, just think about how you scroll through your messages or social media. Do you want to read long pages or would you rather watch a quick video?

Guidebooks & How-Tos

Have a conference coming up in Boston for your members? Send them a guidebook of the city for while they’re here. Guidebooks and How Tos are not only useful but can also show your members that you care. Consider where your members are coming from and their interests. Guidebooks or How Tos that relate to your members are sure to increase engagement, especially when it directly resonates with them. They will definitely be thinking of you when they are touring around a new city before the next conference.

Member Activity

Sharing member success stories or professional activity allows not only your members to become better acquainted with each other, but also shows that you care. Everyone loves a positive story and one that is geared toward fellow members and friends can mean even more.

Feedback

Don’t be afraid to ask. If you demonstrate changes based on your members opinions and feedback it will go a long way. Who doesn’t love the ability to actually give someone his or her opinion? Plus, if you listen, you know what you are sending is truly what your members are looking for.

Before sending out your new eNewsletter or prior to posting on social media, consider these types of content. Take a look at who your members are and what they do. A better understanding of your members and effective use of these types of content will lead to increased engagement and overall satisfaction among your members.

Social selling relies on connections, so how do you make sure you’re connecting with the right people? Talking to the wrong people means wasted time, and much fewer leads than if you talk to the right people. The trick is to qualify your leads before you even talk to them, but how can you do that?

Use Member Profiles

To talk to the right people, you need to know who the right people are. That’s where member profiles or personas can help you. By building up member profiles, you know who you’re looking to connect with before you even start.

A detailed profile of your ideal member can help you figure out:

Who they are

What their needs are

What specific problem you can solve for them

What kind of language they use (not what you think…read on!)

Armed with this information, you can go about finding your ideal members, and reaching out to them in a way that speaks their language and directly addresses their needs.

Member profiles also help you segment your prospects so you can tailor your social posts to each specific group, rather than using a catch all approach. A tailored approach is much more likely to bring you the results you want.

Member profiles get you into the mind-set of your prospects so you can see your association through their eyes, and better understand how to present it in an appealing way.

Listen To Your Members

Your members are the best people to tell you what they need and whether you can provide it. Listen carefully to what they’re saying on social media. What do they talk about, ask or complain about? What are they looking for?

The deeper your understanding of your members, the more accurately you can determine how likely they are to recommend your association. Pay attention to their intentions too; the way you approach a prospect who is looking for information will be different from how you approach a prospect who is showing signs of being ready to join.

Do Your Research

Always research your leads before approaching them. With a group of prospects, that means understanding their needs, motivations, and place in the cycle, as outlined above.

When it comes to individual contacts, make sure you know who they are and what they do. What makes them a good lead for you? Do they have the kind of decision-making power you need them to have? If they’re a business contact, what is their position in their company, and what power do they have to make or sway decisions?

When it comes to research, social prospecting is a must. Social prospecting means finding qualified leads from within your network and beyond, meaning that you’ll focus your efforts on the people who are most likely to convert.

Having a good grasp on who your leads are and what makes them qualified before you start will increase your chances of focusing your efforts on the right people, and converting leads into members.

There are a number of benefits to marketing automation that many organizations utilize. Marketing automation allows constant messaging across the multiple channels of an organization. In fact, “91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is veryimportant to the overall success of their marketing across channels.” However, there are many benefits to utilizing a marketing automation software that not every organization is aware of. Here are a few benefits of marketing automation you may not know:

Marketing and Sales Work Together

At the end of the day, the result of a successful marketing campaign is highlighted by sales. In this instance, automation and sales go hand in hand for a number of reasons. One, marketing automation speeds up the sales process. Everyone knows that automating your campaigns will save immense time and effort on the marketing side. However, what a lot of organizations don’t realize is that it can save time for the sales department as well. These marketing efforts provide the right content to the right people at the right time. With constant communication leads are being pushed through the sales funnel and can result in a quicker return on investment.

Lead Management

Lead management through marketing efforts is made effectively possible with marketing automation. You can nurture and develop leads by providing the right content. Sales and marketing steps can be taken based on the actions already made by the recipient. This software allows you to understand what they want or need. You can successfully lead them in the direction best fit to gain the most information that will help them and you. You gain a better understanding of your leads as a whole and help develop relationships as you accurately track them through the sales funnel.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is simple. The higher the “score” the more likely a sale will happen. The lower the score means that more marketing efforts and communication is most likely needed. This is another example of how sales and marketing work closely together. Throughout a campaign you have the ability of seeing this information and figuring out what the next step needs to be.

Prepare For The Future

With the right software, your organization can see the reports of which marketing efforts lead to sales and which ones did not. If there were certain content pieces that drove high engagement, it would be smart to do those again. But, if certain campaigns or content pieces did not lead to sales or high engagement, it might be best to change for the future. You can alter your actions to gain better results next time.

No Experts Needed

Do you need an expert to do your grocery shopping? Well, marketing automation is the same way! With the right software, marketing automation can be easily utilized by anyone. Setting up campaigns and tracking leads through an automated process does not take an expert.

Any Sized Organization Can Succeed

Marketing automation can work well with any-sized organization. With a small or medium-sized association, automated efforts allow you to increase your reach and saves time and effort. For a larger organization, it keeps things organized and makes sure leads don’t get lost along the way. Like previously mentioned, it does not take a marketing or sales expert, so for any sized association, you can start campaigns with the employees you have. Whether you have a contact list of 50 people or 500,000, marketing automation can help reach them all!

As a whole, marketing automation platforms are great tool for any business, association or organization. “Nearly 70% of businesses are using a marketing automation platform (MAP) or currently implementing one.” This means your competitors are most likely doing so – so you should be too. Start creating your emails, social posts, landing pages, and all other personalized content today!

If you haven’t already, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon and try out a marketing automation tool. Tweet us, @MarketWithMAX, and we’ll give you a code for a free trial of MAX, an affordable and user-friendly cloud-based marketing automation solution.

Whether you send it every week, month or quarter, don’t neglect your email newsletter. And by neglect, I mean don’t let it get boring. Don’t let your newsletter be the lost piece of marketing in your audience’s inbox each time you send. Like the latest iPhone, you have to keep evolving your newsletter with the times. Here are six ways to spice up your newsletter and get your audience reading again.

Create a welcome email

Sure, it might be extra work, but consider sending a warm welcome whenever someone opts in to your newsletter. Use the opportunity to simply say hello in a beautiful or funny way. Don’t overcrowd the email with too much company info or news. The warm gesture is enough and will leave them with a good taste for your organization. Email sending services like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor allow for automated set up so you can make sure your welcome email fires off without a hitch!

Spice up your subject life

Thought you saw a typo? Guess again! Merely a simple Spice Girls pun for your reading pleasure. This type of nonsense is exactly what I’m talking about. Give your subject line an upgrade and be witty, sassy or bold (while maintaining your brand voice – of course!). You use emojis in your everyday text, so don’t be afraid to use them in the subject line to make reading more fun, eye-catching and conversational. Scared to dive right in? Do some A/B testing with your traditional, informative subject line against one with a little more pizazz and you might be surprised at the difference it makes on your click-open rate!

Keep content short and sweet

Say what you need to say. There’s a reason you’re sending a newsletter: to inform your community about what’s going on. But can you say it without forcing such a commitment on your reader? Their time is important, so take less of it by considering the following: Does the any of the information in your email exist somewhere else on the web? If so, consider teasing your reader with an interesting snippet of content and linking to the source. Is your email one, long story with several paragraphs of text? Consider breaking the email into sections with prominent headers for topics like events, important dates, news, featured members, celebrations, and others. Lastly, proofread your email for redundancies. You could be repeating content – such as dates, locations and more – that has the potential to be deleted, shortening (and sweetening) your email.

Use buttons

Not only do they make an attractive addition to your newsletter design, buttons provide the obvious click call-to-action your email might have been missing. How many hyperlinked words appear in your email copy? Too many? It may be time to evaluate whether they could be complemented by – or better yet – replaced with a nice, big button. Today’s email user is accustomed to opening an email and scanning it for the most important parts. Highlight that important information with a button that clearly outlines the action you most want them to take: “learn more” “buy now”
“redeem” etc.

Include deals & offers

Do you care about your members? Do you care about your business partners? Great! Benefit both by offering deals from your partners for your members to take advantage of. Maybe a discounted Lyft ride… Perhaps a free coffee from your local shop… Even a reduced ticket price to an event can enhance brand loyalty, strengthen relationships and entice future opens on your email, increasing your click-open rate!

Get feedback from your community

Try out some of these strategies and ask your readers what they think! Send a quick survey or start an internal chat with your most active members. Whatever you do, let them participate! After all, they’re the ones you need to please.

Moral of the story? Don’t be afraid to try new things in your newsletter. In fact, always keep trying new things! (If you’re going to pick one to try first, I vote emoji.) It’s kind of like a 20-year marriage, you’ve got to keep things interesting.

Can marketing automation help grow your association’s membership? Simple answer, yes. Marketing automation is the use of software to automate your marketing processes in a much more efficient way, and to deliver consistent, timely, and relevant content to your prospects and members. For associations, utilizing an automated marketing software can translate into growing membership by allowing you to do the following:

Keep Brand Consistency

Brand consistency is essential for your association. You want to make sure your message is strong, clear, and consistent across all channels. Through marketing automation, you can plan out your entire campaign and see the overall structure as a whole. This allows you to make sure there is consistency. For potential new members, they will easily be able to understand your association’s message. Having this strong voice will attract those prospects.

Boost Member Engagement

Your current members play an extremely important role in the growth of your association. With engaging members, they can help spread the word about your association and recruit new members. If prospects see this engagement and passion from your current members, they are more likely to want to join. If all your members are silent, then the attractiveness of your association will suffer. Without their help it may be difficult to grow and continue success. With automation, you can monitor which members are engaging and help push content to those who are not.

Maintain Current Members

Just as it is important to grow and find new members, it is equally as important for the success of your association to maintain the members you already have. Losing members is not a good sign for the growth of your association. If prospects see satisfied current members that have been with the association for many years, it will certainly increase their likelihood to join. Through marketing automation, you can send out personalized content to all of your different members based on their needs to keep them engaged and attract new members along the way.

Track Content to Your Prospects

When you automate your marketing efforts, you have the ability to automatically send out specific content at specific times. Just like points along a “sales funnel,” you are giving them targeted messages at the right time to push them through to join the association. Also, you have the ability to track what they click on to better improve those tailored messages. When tracking prospects, automated messages push their general interest into commitment to your association. Turning interest into commitment, means turning prospects into members.

Increase Flexibility

Marketing automation, like mentioned before, allows you to send what you want, when you want, to whom you want. Give prospects what they want by tailoring your message to each recipient. Your automated campaigns are created by you and can be altered to what fits your association’s message. Just set up your steps, import your prospects and members, and boom – your marketing automation software takes care of the rest!

Most associations have one overall goal: Gain and retain members. Using marketing automation software allows not only maximum reach to prospects, but also constant personalized content to current members. By taking care of your current members and targeting prospects with information that is relevant to them, you are increasing the ability to grow and succeed as an association.

A Note From The Author

If you like what you read here, I encourage you to read the Association Marketing Toolkit, which is full of additional resources, tips, and ideas for marketing your association!